Anaheim’s City Council will start off the new year not only by apparently approving a settlement to their litigation with the ACLU — having successfully delayed single-member districts until 2016, after what their corporate sponsors hope is the re-election of Kris Murray and, less importantly, Gail Eastman — but also by spending $129,000 to hire a Cleveland, Ohio firm called The Superlative Group to spend a year selling corporate naming rights to the ARTIC Train Station.

Waste of time and money. I’ve already got the perfect proposal — presuming that the Superlative Group doesn’t want to buy the rights itself, because then we could call ARTIC the Superlative Train Station, and that would make it so.

While we’d want the Prestige name on the building (for the prestige), they would of course want to feature at least one product in the train station’s name. In the spirit of “something for the ladies,” I’ve mocked up an image for naming rights honoring the Massengill brand — the company whose product safety blunder (as in “we didn’t know that that was poisonous!”) during the Great Depression led directly to the Pure Food and Drug Act.

Naming something after a bank or a phone company is boring. For the sake of the prestige it stands to gain with the new ARTIC station, Anaheim deserves better. Please feel welcome to offer your own suggestions for corporate name-rights-holders in comments.

About Greg Diamond

Somewhat verbose worker's rights and government accountability attorney, residing in northwest Brea. General Counsel of CATER, the Coalition of Anaheim Taxpayers for Economic Responsibility, a non-partisan group of people sick of local corruption.
Deposed as Northern Vice Chair of DPOC in April 2014 when his anti-corruption and pro-consumer work in Anaheim infuriated the Building Trades and Teamsters in spring 2014, who then worked with the lawless and power-mad DPOC Chair to eliminate his internal oversight.
Occasionally runs for office to challenge some nasty incumbent who would otherwise run unopposed. (Someday he might pick a fight with the intent to win rather than just dent someone. You'll know it when you see it.) He got 45% of the vote against Bob Huff for State Senate in 2012 and in 2014 became the first attorney to challenge OCDA Tony Rackauckas since 2002.
None of his pre-putsch writings ever spoke for the Democratic Party at the local, county, state, national, or galactic level, nor do they now.
A family member co-owns a business offering campaign treasurer services to Democratic candidates and the odd independent. He is very proud of her. He doesn't directly profit from her work and it doesn't affect his coverage. (He does not always favor her clients, though she might hesitate to take one that he truly hated.)
He does advise some local campaigns informally and (so far) without compensation. (If that last bit changes, he will declare the interest.)